Black Knight Inc. has added ICE Mortgage Rate Lock Index Futures within CompassPoint, a risk management and loan sale platform offered by Optimal Blue, a division of Black Knight. This expanded suite of futures will help lenders better manage their interest rate risk by offering new techniques for hedging conforming and jumbo mortgage loans and mortgage servicing rights.
“We work with hundreds of clients every day to hedge the interest rate risk of mortgage pipelines, and we’re excited to bring yet another innovation to the market that helps our lenders avoid basis risk and additional transaction costs when hedging certain mortgage loans,” says Scott Happ, president of Optimal Blue, a division of Black Knight. “While the to-be-announced marketplace is very effective at hedging the majority of our lenders’ pipelines, the addition of the ICE Mortgage Rate Lock Index Futures with CompassPoint will deliver expanded support for hedging mortgage servicing rights, jumbo loans or loans with extended lock terms.”
Optimal Blue delivers a product, pricing and eligibility (PPE) engine that prices over 40% of locks in the U.S. mortgage industry and is fully integrated with the CompassPoint platform. Optimal Blue’s secondary solutions then extend into loan trading with ResiTrader, a loan trading platform which represented $1.4 trillion of loan trades in 2021.
“With the introduction of this new futures instrument, we further improve the ability to match the right hedge with the right loan for our clients and demonstrate our commitment to providing the secondary market with the most innovative capabilities to help them make informed decisions,” Happ continues. “We’re pleased that these new capabilities complement our leading analytics, valuation tools, BESTX pricing engines and trading platform in our end-to-end secondary marketing technology ecosystem.”